Tuesday, April 06, 2010

The Last Band

The Boy Who Played the Trumpet, The Girl Who Played the Drum, The Boy Who Played the Drum

each piece is 12 x 12 inches, acrylic on canvas

$140.00 / $160.00 framed.

These pieces fall into that special category of "Stuff I never got around to doing", I have done these sketches at least three times over in moleskines and sketchbooks and kept doing other work before I'd get around to them. I wanted to expand on the world of "The Boy Who Loved the Water", the child in the life jacket who keeps reappearing in my work over the years, I wanted to take the sense of the larger world around the small child and expand on it somehow, finally deciding that now was the time to do it.

I was showing my process to my girlfriend, deconstructing how I spend my evenings doing notes and sketches, starting with what to do immediately in the morning, then some notes on how to hang the show, then some reminders on things to touch up and then sketching, at the end of the session there is usually one good idea, six bad ones and two very funny doodles, well these kept being moved back as I found new ideas in those sessions, but last week I wrote a list of work I'd like to do and hadn't gotten around to and "The Last Band" was pretty much at the top of that list, so here they are. I am also working on a 20 x 20 sized version of "the Boy Who Played the Drum" which I hope to finish today/tomorrow.

I also like the colour schemes in these very much, moving away from the Prussian Blue backgrounds and bases and using a more brown/red influence in the palette. The 20 x20 I'm working on is similar in the fact that I'm using a Pthalo Blue and Sienna ground instead.